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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24515596">how's a snake get out of skin?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey'>fluorescentgrey</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Moonage Daydream [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Glam Rock, M/M, velvet goldmine au</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:48:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,261</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24515596</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Hickey wants out from under his contract, even if he has to get under Fitzjames to do it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Commander James Fitzjames/Cornelius Hickey, William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Moonage Daydream [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1773430</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>how's a snake get out of skin?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve/gifts">reserve</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Once you knew how to look out for men like James Fitzjames, they were all around you, and they were easy. They could be got by judicious application of roughery and innocence. They were swayed by insouciance. They desired above all to feel youthful. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hickey was nothing if not adaptable, and he wanted out from under the hideous contract that kept him tied to James Fitzjames, Francis Crozier, and the Discovery Records roster for meager enough pay that he was still living in a squat in Deptford. He wanted out from under this contract even if he had to get under Fitzjames to do it. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Billy was skeptical. He suspected something. Hickey had never before known him to be so intolerably jealous. When he woke up, Hickey had already been awake for an hour or so, staring at the ceiling, conspiring, not really wanting to get up from the pile of blankets on the floor, because it was warm, even though they were obliged to sleep in all their clothes. “What are you thinking about,” Billy said, hoarse with sleep. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Nothing.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’ve never known you to think about nothing in your life.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He watched Fitzjames at rehearsal, and he watched Fitzjames when they performed, rather more than was strictly necessary. During most of their songs, he was obliged to watch Tozer, so that he could follow the guitar line on keys, or Des Voeux, to be sure his timing was correct, especially on the songs where the piano suited as a percussive instrument. Maybe he was getting cocky. He understood the way the songs moved now like they were part of his body, and sometimes he thought he could predict what Tozer or Des Voeux or even Billy might do, just based on how they looked and how the light was moving… sometimes it all made him think of that Bowie lyric: “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine…” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">On the fateful night, Hickey had overheard a whispered argument in Fitzjames’s dressing room on his way to the stage, and then Crozier had shouldered roughly past him in the narrow, mildewy hall. The stick up his ass appeared to be paining him even more than usual. In short, the time was right. Whilst they waited for Fitzjames in the wings Hickey got a bump of coke off Des Voeux and a series of thumping brotherly back-pats from Tozer, and then the lights went down, there was a flash of glitter and feathers across the stage, screams from the crowd, and they stepped into the mystery. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Later he did not remember what happened very clearly, but there were enough pictures in the tabloids. Toward the raucous denouement of “North by Northwest,” perhaps the sultriest and most theatrical epic from Fitzjames’s new album predominantly composed of sultry and theatrical epics, Fitzjames sprawled his entire lanky being all over the grand piano like a mink stole or a peacock display. He had done this a few times before, thrashing around emotively while Hickey worked through the most complex keyboard line in the entire show, but he had not yet taken it to these great heights: when he had gotten bored he simply climbed over the pinblock and the rim, striking a Terry de Havilland heel discordantly against the low keys, and settled himself in Hickey’s lap. </span>
</p><p class="p2">--</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hickey hadn’t been in his dressing room ten minutes before there was a knock at the door. He carefully schooled his face. It would not do to answer it with savage expectation. He managed the barest modicum of naivety and surprise, but it was enough to fool Fitzjames, who was leaning up against the lintel, sequined bolero jacket open over his naked chest. “Mr. Hickey,” he said. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Mr. Fitzjames.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Please,” said Fitzjames, pushing past him into the dark room, “just James.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hickey closed the door behind him and leaned against it. He emphatically did not say, call me Cornelius. Fitzjames had sat in the chair before the vanity, inspecting Hickey’s comparatively meager spread of makeup; he seemed loathe to pull his gaze entirely from the mirror, but at last his eyes alit on the baggie of cocaine dust resting against Hickey’s well-worn copy of <em>The Thief’s Journal. </em>“Shall we,” he said, holding the baggie aloft. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Be my guest.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames scooped up some powder under his lacquered fingernail and held it to his nose, inhaling forcefully. He offered the bag to Hickey, who shook his head. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You sounded good tonight,” Fitzjames said. This was not unsurprising, given that he could be a right miser with praise. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Despite interruption.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames thought he knew the game. In all fairness, he probably did know a game that this game looked like. He furrowed his perfectly manicured brow and cocked his perfectly coiffed head. The quantity of hairspray he probably had to use to keep his curls looking like that after two hours of sweat and queenery probably could have killed someone. “Are you really put out about it,” he asked. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Put out? No.” Hickey shrugged. “Showbiz.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Do you think I would prostrate myself over your lap just to sharpen the tabloids’ teeth?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Of course he would, and they both knew it. But to pretend it was the reason for the night’s display was preposterous. He had done it for one reason and one reason alone, and it was the same reason that Hickey was about to do what he knew he was about to do. The reason’s name was Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I don’t know, sir,” Hickey said. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Hm,” said Fitzjames. “I find you to be an unusual case, Mr. Hickey.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“How so?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Anybody else would be on their knees by now.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He bristled, though he’d expected something like this. “Lest you forget, I was almost ten years in Catholic school, sir,” he said. “I’ve rather had it with kneeling.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I suppose you’ve rather had it with lecherous old men too.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Depends on the old man.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">If you really want me, he was thinking, you’re going to have to make it count. If I’m to be your <em>liaison dangereuse </em>to hold over Crozier’s head, you had best make it a damn good one. Besides, he hated sucking cock, and how much he hated it was glaringly obvious, or so Billy was always telling him. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Why don’t we do you one better,” Fitzjames said, “if you don’t object.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I can’t object if I don’t know what it is,” Hickey said, or so he was halfway through saying when Fitzjames got to his feet and crossed the room in two strides of his birdish beheeled legs and pinned him against the door. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjzmes had recently had a breath mint, and a shot of whiskey. “You’re a cheeky one,” he said. He unclenched his left fist from the fabric of Hickey’s school jacket and dragged it down Hickey’s chest and stomach toward his belt buckle. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“So I’ve been told.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Were you beaten in school?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Just about every other day.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Where?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You’ll see.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It was rather like a dance. It was not dissimilar to the way he felt onstage with Fitzjames sometimes, like they were contributing to the same grand and beautiful work, which he could almost see weaving itself together before his eye, soaring in strands of bright golden glitter in the darkness. His hands joined Fitzjames’s at his belt; he unbuckled, unsnapped, unzipped, peeled the waist of the gold PVC trousers over his hips — he hated how hard he was, but nothing could be done about that — and Fitzjames knelt. “You really are a redhead,” he said. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Did you think I wasn’t?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames smirked. It was that he thought they were of the same kind that was so enraging. They could not more plainly be two incredibly different people, Hickey thought, pressing his thumb into the hinge of Fitzjames’ jaw. His mouth was like a hot door into a dark room. He couldn’t do a god damn thing himself, not in the studio, not onstage, not here, hence obliging Hickey to feed him his cock as though it were a prime cut of meat. He thought, later, in retrospect, that he probably should have been brutal, and that Crozier probably thought that he had been, and that Fitzjames was not about to do anything to disabuse him of that notion, but all he did was cradle Fitzjames’s head at the back of his neck. His hair was surprisingly soft, given all the hairspray that was in it. For a moment he lost where he was, and who he was, such that if Fitzjames had asked his name he might have said the wrong one, and who he was with, so that later, in his masturbatory fantasies, or during disappointing sex, when he pulled up this memory from the file like a dog-eared dirty magazine, it might just as easily have been Crozier, or Sol Tozer, or any number of the profs who had beaten him in school; it was a moment of sweetness which was almost beyond revenge. He departed himself; he tried not to make a sound, but probably failed. When he came back around again Fitzjames, who had swallowed, god bless him, was putting a weird chaste kiss on the head of his spent cock. This in attempt to distract from or seek forgiveness for the fact that his spindly delicate fingers had found their way between Hickey's legs to investigate his asshole. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“No,” Hickey said. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames looked up at him. His mouth was very red. “Why not?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I don’t like to.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I can make it — ” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I said I don’t like to.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Now he was the one put out. “Fine,” he said, standing. He was so hard and his pants were so tight that it must have hurt. Perhaps he liked it that way. Perhaps Crozier did. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1"><em>My</em> knickers? Hickey thought. Neither of us are wearing underwear! </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Instead he leaned over to the vanity and grabbed the tin of vaseline he used sometimes to take off particularly stubborn eye makeup. “You can do it in the style of the Greeks,” Hickey told Fitzjames. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Of course, he was obliged to peel his pants around his knees and generously lube up his own thighs and arrange himself like a rag doll against the door for Fitzjames’s use. The handful of times he had turned tricks hadn’t even been this much work. And even after all that, Fitzjames’s thumb brushed his asshole again. “Shame,” he said. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’m not kidding,” Hickey said against the door. “I know you get bloody everything you want, but — ” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames’s arm wrapped around his hip and his open hand pressed low on Hickey’s belly, fingernails tight at the ridge of his pubic hair. “I do not get everything I want,” he said in Hickey’s ear. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Don’t you?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames smacked his thigh, hard. “Put in a little effort, Mr. Hickey.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It didn’t exactly feel good, but it didn’t exactly feel bad. Occasionally the head of Fitzjames’s cock brushed something wholly untenable in its perfect deliciousness, and occasionally it appeared from between Hickey’s thighs, bright and smooth, like the nose of a mole or something. More than once he found his head at rest upon Fitzjames’s shoulder and was obliged to theatrically toss it around a few times in mock ecstasy. Toward the end, everything was slick and spinning, ungainly, sputtering, like birds fucking, and Hickey stepped one foot over the other to compel Fitzjames to just get it over with already. It was a cheap trick and he didn’t quite expect it would work, but it did. Fitzjames muffled a choked-off cry in his neck, twitching against him, the zipper of those fucking pants digging hard into Hickey’s ass. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hickey breathed. He hated this part. He waited for it to be over. There was more to be done. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Fitzjames separated from him woozily, doing up his pants, palming come off his belly and smearing it against the wall. Hickey sat down in the chair in front of the vanity, pants around his knees, and reached for the half-empty beer he’d abandoned in the lifetime before he had fucked James Fitzjames. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Cheers, then,” Fitzjames said, running a shaky hand through his hair. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Cheers.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Next time?” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hickey did not intend for there to ever be a next time. In fact, he did not entirely intend to ever see Fitzjames again. But maybe it was good etiquette, if somebody had just given you one of your all time top five blowjobs, to let them believe otherwise at least for a few minutes. “Alright,” he said. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Tops,” said Fitzjames rather breathlessly, “that’s tops,” and he was out the door. </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hickey listened to his own breathing whilst he wrestled it back under control. Upstairs whoever was cleaning up in the concert hall was listening to the Velvet Underground doing “Foggy Notion.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">
    <em>She made me do something that I never did before<br/>
</em>
  </span>
  <span class="s1"></span>
    <em>I rushed right down to a flower store</em><br/>

  
  <span class="s1">
    <em>I bought her a bundle, a beautiful batch<br/>
</em>
  </span>
  <span class="s1"></span>
  <em>Don’t you know something, she sent ‘em right back</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Eventually he got up. The pants went back on easily, because of all the residual lube. Hickey put his t-shirt and denim jacket on, shoved the coke and the vaseline and the eyebrow pencils and <em>The Thief’s Journal </em>in the pockets. He stood in front of the mirror for a few moments, arranging his semi-erection for maximal visibility, pinching more red into his cheeks, making sure his hair looked as fucked as possible, and then he went out into the hall, shutting off the light behind him, in search of Francis Crozier.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">---</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">--</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">-</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>this AU is a joint effort of myself and chloe aka <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve">reserve</a>... she thought up this scene in our initial brainstorming and it was an honor and a pleasure to write it. if you haven't seen todd haynes' 1998 masterpiece <i>velvet goldmine</i> please watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RFUc8ScWJ8&amp;">this scene on youtube</a> right now. this piece is named after my favorite lyric from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwrCUEMl76U">"friction" by television.</a> </p><p>this was written in exchange for chloe's donation to the <a href="https://brooklynbailfund.org/">brooklyn bail fund</a>. i'm doing an <a href="https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/619725572783947777/yeats-infection-yeats-infection">ongoing fundraising drive</a> for organizations on the front line of the racial justice movement right now - if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will, please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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